The wonders of Isometric creations

I have always been very intrigued about the great looks and illusions of dept that Isometric illiustrations and isometric games can give. So much that I finally decided to give it a shot and try it out.
It kind of reminded me of the time I took the apprenticeship of carpentry – I had to learn some constructional drawing skills. Dots and lines, drawn across a paper could suddently make a figure pop out in 3D. The complex simplicity is similar when making Isometric art.

I thought it was a great experience, but I really wanted to make isometric art faster – and found this awesome tool: Marmorset Hexels 2. I downloaded the trial and jumped straight in and created the following three pieces:

I did these 3 in a little over 1 hour a piece, and I was so amazed that I bought Hexels2 straight away. Just by using simple shades, the illusion of dept was emminent, and anyone I showed this could easily see the depth.

I still felt like there was more to isometric creation that needed to be explored. Details are missing from this way of making isometric art in Hexels2, so I decided to bring it to a pixel-level.

Another win.. But then my constantly challenging brain thought – how about making it change itself in a smooth animation – like scrolling sideways and always generating new map. The difficulty about this is memory in the browser – I had to build something that didnt just keept adding to the memory. So I came up with the idea of modifying the array – removing tiles from one end, and adding new ones to the other end.

So.. what is next you might think? I am speculating on ways to recreate this in Unity in 2.5D – so I can be able to add dynamic lightning and make the trees cast shadows. But before I do this, I guess I have to brush off on my unity skills – since I havent worked with unity since v.4 was brand new.